Ronald asked me what I was going to do if I found Grady Granger's grave, but I really didn't give it much thought. After all, Grady had been dead for nearly 92 years, so whatever I said while standing by his grave wouldn't matter much to him.
The exact moment I left Interstate 10 on my way to Dothan, turning off at exit 152 on to State Road 69, I remembered the clipping Mom had mailed to Ronald and he had emailed to me identifying the burial site. I remembered that I had forgotten to bring it with me. I needed to stop and buy gas and could perhaps use my laptop to find the old email, but connecting to wireless just off I-10 in southeast Jackson County was not likely.
I remembered that the cemetery was near Malone, but I didn't remember the name of the cemetery or if there was an adjacent church. When I had gotten the email I searched online maps and found the cemetery. I knew it was west of Malone's only traffic light, but that was all I remembered.
As I drove past gently rolling farmland, through Dellwood and Two Egg and then turning north onto State Road 71 in Greenwood, I wallowed a little in my disappointment at not remembering to bring the clipping. The day I received it I had every intention of taking it with me the next time I traveled to Dothan. I would take it with me and stop at the cemetery to see the grave. As I drove closer to Malone, I debated whether or not to take a shot and just start looking for little country church cemeteries to the west of the center of town. Could be there were only one or two; could be there were many more.
When I got to Malone's traffic light, I did not turn west; I drove through the intersection and continued north, but within a block I made a u-turn through an IGA parking lot, went back to the light and turned west on to State Road 2, the lowest numbered state road in Florida, running east and west nearly parallel to the Alabama state line, cutting through more rich rolling earth with long established family farms bordered by ancient elm and water oak.
In less than a mile I came to the first intersection: Collins Chapel Road. Could it be that easy? I drove the near half-mile to the end of the pavement where a small one-room church sat across a dirt road from the congregation's cemetery. I parked and walked up one row of headstones and down another looking for a Granger. The cemetery was bordered on three sides by plowed fields, recently harvested of something, and in the distance a thick stand of trees from beyond which drifted occasional cheers and shouts in unison. I guessed it was probably a ball game, perhaps a church softball game, maybe at another church. It was the only sound in the middle of that sunny Saturday afternoon.
In 15 minutes I had read every headstone and determined there were no Grangers. There were lots of Harts and Baxters and both Mathews and Matthews. Collins Chapel was certainly a family cemetery with a handful of families dominating the plots, but there were no Grangers.
That attempt at finding the grave was all I felt I had time for, so I drove back to Malone and at its traffic light turned back north driving past the Jackson County Correctional Facility where in the distance inmates were enjoying a softball game outdoors on a Saturday afternoon, cheering loudly. I decided not to make any more stops that day looking for Grady Granger's grave.
I crossed the state line on Florida State Road 71, which then becomes Alabama State Road 53 known locally as the Cottonwood Road, absent any of the fanfare one sees on Interstate 95 or even on U.S. Highway 231. There are no welcome stations serving up howdys and maps and brochures. There is a sign in uniform traffic code green with white lettering: Alabama State Line, Bob Riley, Governor. What else did I need to know?
Just a few hundred yards into the Heart of Dixie stood another small green sign: Grangerburg. Could this be the homestead of the Granger family? It was a crossroads with no church, so even if I had not already given up the grave hunt, there was no place to look.
Around the next bend in the two lane road, past fields of cotton to be picked, stood a small square white church with a roadside cemetery, then a little farther a dirt road called Granger Road. As I had done in Malone, I made a quick u-turn, this time through the empty drive of a deserted country store, and once again I was walking among a waist high hedge of headstones, nearly 50 altogether. This time there were Grangers, nearly a third of the headstones were for Grangers, but there was no Grady. There were none even old enough to be Grady. Certainly though, I must have been close.
The sun was setting and I was late, so I sighed and drove on to Dothan.
Later that evening, after a fine birthday dinner, I sat on the couch with my laptop. Mom wasn't sure where she had placed the original clipping, and I was too impatient to sort through emails, so I just retraced my path by scouring online maps of country roads west of Malone. Quickly, almost immediately, I saw Friendship Baptist Church, just off State Road 2, just west of Collins Chapel Road. Maybe that was it. Maybe I had just not gone far enough.
I searched online for "Jackson County, Florida cemeteries," found Friendship Baptist Church and lying there, buried in the long list of names were eight Grangers including "H. Brady Granger." Brady? Maybe it was a typo on the list. The death date, 1915, was right. I felt close. I decided to take a look on my way home the following day.
I studied the maps and saw that the easiest route was to backtrack through Malone and simply travel a little farther down State Road 2. I also saw that I could slip into Florida in as near a stealthy fashion as possible by turning off the Cottonwood Road at Grangerburg onto Wood Yard Road which becomes Friendship Church Road at the state line. Seemed that would make it easy to find the church and would likely be a more interesting drive.
Bits of loose gravel were scattered over Wood Yard Road's red clay surface, but the autumn rains kept it from being dusty. I remembered the pause in Lauren's voice, the questioning-my-judgment pause, when in my phone call home the night before I described stopping and wandering through country graveyards sitting at the end of deserted dirt roads. She said the setting sounded a little sketchy.
The roadside was populated with stretched out fields, some freshly plowed and ready for the next season, many with cotton to be picked, the remnants of the summer growing season. At each turn in the road there were small, modest farm houses, generations old, situated in groves of a half dozen laurel oak or pecan trees, surrounded by bare dirt yards diligently swept clean. These yards had never been mowed; they had always been swept with yard brooms. Even though people who sweep their farmhouse yards are not foreign to me, I am foreign to them, except the ones who are my relatives. I was not hesitant about being there, but I did not want to have to knock on any door. I was not afraid. I just did not want to have to explain slipping across the state line back into Florida, down a red clay dirt road, in a Scion, mid-day on a Sunday, looking for the grave of a man who was not an ancestor. Maybe that is what Lauren feared, that I would have to explain what I was doing to someone who would not understand.
When dirt met pavement I saw the fresh white clapboards of Friendship Baptist Church and the cemetery behind it. Sand spurs and bits of grass lay between the graves along with sporadic square foot areas of sod, evidence of valiant efforts to enhance the sandy plots. Beyond the last row of tombstones were bare fields stretching out to a tall dark stand of trees that lined a horizon that seemed more than miles away. I parked at the edge of the road, walked into the cemetery and in less than a minute was standing at the foot of three Granger graves. In the middle was Grady.
H. Grady Granger
Husband of Alma M. Granger
Born Mar. 26, 1889
Died Nov. 27, 1915
When I read the inscription, I learned that he was 26 years old and had a wife named Alma. She was not buried by his side but had inscribed a poem on the back side of the headstone.
Husband thou hast from me flown
To the regions above.
I your wife erect this stone
Concentrated by my love.
Buried to his right was Otis, born nine years after Grady, and to his left was John ,born three years later. These may have been his little brothers who lost him when they were in their teens, and then lived their lives well into their seventies and eighties without him and apparently without wives or children since they were buried without other family as well. I knew I stood where they had stood on the day of Grady's funeral. Otis and John along with Alma and other family members, probably law enforcement officers, maybe community leaders, maybe even Sheriff John May himself, Grady's boss. Perhaps the sheriff had proscribed the slab's inscription.
His life was taken while serving as a Deputy Sheriff of Houston County, Ala. He lost his life in the enforcement of law, for the better of the coming Generations.
I didn't know Grady Granger; he died nearly forty years before I was born. I only knew of him because my great uncle killed him. His name is little more than a footnote to the life story my granddaddy shared from his own boyhood, about his older brother and the shooting. My search for Grady Granger's grave was driven only by my curiosity to know more about what happened on a November Saturday night in 1915 in the Frogtown section of Dothan. Finding the grave told me nothing about that split second that changed so many lives so long ago and for years to come, and yet finding the grave made it all very real to me.
I thought of Ronald's question now that I stood by the grave. I said what no one else had probably ever said.
"I'm sorry."